Danish Wind Co-ops Can Show Us the Way
By Russ Christianson
It was hard to make out the usually
prominent downtown skyline. Even the CN
Tower was barely visible through the
smoggy haze clogging the lakeshore. As my
family and I arrived at Pearson Airport,
having been away for most of the month of
June in Denmark and France, we were
greeted by one of the worst air quality days
in Toronto’s history.
Our arrival to the gridlock in Toronto was a
stark contrast to strolling the pedestrian and
bicycle friendly streets of Copenhagen,
Denmark’s largest city. With a population
over one million, it’s about half the size of
the pre-amalgamated City of Toronto. And
while Torontonians struggle to breath the
air, the people of Copenhagen (and
thousands of tourists) enjoy a very peoplefriendly atmosphere. In contrast to North
America, bicycles, pedestrians, and ultramodern public transit systems rule over the
private automobile.
The Dane’s emphasis on non-polluting
individual and public transportation is not
Middelgrunden: The latest and largest wind power
the only reason for cleaner air in their major
co-operative in Denmark, just off the coast of
city. After the first oil crisis in 1973, the
Copenhagen. More than seven thousand members own
Danes began a grassroots movement that
this 40 MW offshore wind park together with local
shifted their national energy priorities. At
utilities. It was inaugurated in May 2001.
the time, Denmark was almost completely
dependent on foreign oil for heating, transportation and electricity generation. Like many
countries, they faced a fork in the road, and with characteristic intelligence and pragmatism, they
chose conservation and renewable energy, and left the nuclear option behind.
Grassroots Power
HURUP, Denmark – Jane Kruse is a soft-spoken, self-assured, thoughtful person. She’s dressed
comfortably in a blouse and slacks, and her auburn hair has a single braid running down her
back. Jane is the Director of Information and Training at the Nordic Folkecentre for Renewable
Energy. The Folkecentre was founded in 1983, in Thy (pronounced “tie”) one of the poorest
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areas of Denmark, and is a world leader in developing prototypes for commercial applications of
renewable energy.
It’s a sunny June day, and there’s a refreshing sea breeze blowing across the land. Jane and I sit
at a picnic table on the Folkecentre grounds. We’re surrounded by a collection of energy
efficient buildings with solar panels, and an eclectic mix of various renewable energy prototypes,
including biogas generators, wind turbines, and an electric car. Ms. Kruse is a pioneer in the
Danish feminist movement and is a founding member of the local wind energy co-operative
(started in 1988).
I ask Jane how Denmark became the world leader in wind turbine technology. She pauses for a
moment and responds that “young people and women were very vocal against nuclear energy”.
The momentum of the no-nukes movement built steadily through the nineteen seventies and
early eighties. “In April 1985, bowing to public pressure, the Danish Parliament (the Folketing)
made the decision to not build nuclear reactors. This was one year before the core meltdown at
the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine.”
Jane continues, “But, we were not only struggling against nuclear, we also wanted to work for
positive alternatives.” Women politicians created a coalition against nuclear energy and “cooperated across parties to pass legislation supportive of renewable energy.” This strategy was
possible because Denmark’s proportional representation voting system encourages women to run
as candidates, and elects more women. Indeed, the percentage of women elected in Denmark has
been stable at 34% for fifteen years, while Canada only elected 17% women in the last two
federal elections.
One of the legacies of Denmark’s grassroots feminist movement, is a landscape dotted with
5,300 wind turbines. Everywhere you travel in Denmark, there are wind turbines on the horizon.
On the Folkecentre’s island, with a mostly rural population of 12,000, there are 142 wind
turbines. As a first time traveller here, I simply equate Denmark with these beautiful
aerodynamic pinwheels.
Most of Denmark’s wind farms were erected by local co-operatives and individual farmers. In
1980, the Social Democratic government offered a thirty percent subsidy for new wind energy
installations. This provided the Danish wind industry the start-up support it needed to build itself
into the world leader from the bottom up, creating 20,000 jobs in the process.
In 1988, a newly elected Liberal-Conservative government cut the subsidy in half. However, the
return on investment in wind energy continued at fifteen to twenty five percent because of three
lynch pins in the Social Democratic policy for community-owned wind energy:
1. The right to connect to the electrical grid;
2. A legal obligation for electrical utilities to purchase wind energy; and
3. A guaranteed fair price.
In 1993, the Social Democrats were again elected, and held office in various coalition
governments until 2001. This was the golden age for wind energy in Denmark, with production
more than tripling from 1,200 to 4,100 GWh. Eighty-five percent of the turbines were owned by
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local co-operatives and individual farmers, and by 2001, wind farm production was providing
twelve percent of Denmark’s electricity, enough for 1.2 million Danish households.
However, when the Liberal-Conservative coalition government was re-elected in 2001, they
pulled the plug on wind energy by saying that it had to stand on its own in the “free” market. A
“free” market that subsidizes fossil fuels with tax breaks and by externalizing health and
environmental costs.
In the words of Bjarne Lundager Jensen, the Managing Director of the Danish Wind Industry
Association (the lobby group for the large wind turbine manufacturing companies), “after some
tremendous years in the late 1990’s, it was uphill for the industry with the conservative
government. The depressing fact is that in 2004 only five wind turbines were erected on Danish
soil.”
Industry Consolidation
Preben Maegaard, the founder and Director of the Nordic Folkecenter for Renewable Energy and
the President of the World Wind Energy Association, looks strikingly similar to the British actor
Alastair Sim, in his most famous role, Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol.
Mr. Maegaard has white hair, steel eyes, and just like Ebenezer on Christmas morning, a ready
smile.
I’m sitting with Preben in the boardroom at the Nordic Folkecentre for Renewable Energy. Like
most rooms in Denmark, it’s designed with smooth clean lines. The black board has a recent
sketch of Hubert’s peak oil curve, and the thermopane windows have state-of-the-art thin film
solar cells.
It takes Preben a little while to warm up, but a half hour into our meeting, he’s on a roll. He has
just returned from a trip around the world, including Canada’s Maritime Provinces, Toronto,
Vancouver, Cuba and Japan. In April, he gave a presentation on Danish community-owned wind
farms in Alliston Ontario. He says wistfully, “This meeting in Alliston reminded me of similar
meetings in Denmark in the late 1970s. At the time, I would present at four of these meetings
each week. There were always hundreds of people, and like Alliston, more people than could fit
in the room.”
Preben looks squarely into my eyes and says, “Canada has a special situation at this moment, like
Denmark after the 1970s energy crisis, or in Germany after Chernobyl. But, renewable energy
development will only happen with the right legislation.”
For Preben, renewable energy means more than the hard technology itself. Renewable energy is
intrinsically decentralized, small and medium scale, and democratic. “The decentralized nature
of renewable energy requires new organizational structures and alliances, that’s the role of coops. When local people own the wind farms, and share in the benefits, they will support them. It
won’t be NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), it will be POOL (Please On Our Land).”
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Maegaard is strongly opposed to Denmark’s current energy policy. “There is now severe
discrimination against community power in favour of big companies. The new energy policy
only talks about competition. Our politicians can only think about market solutions and bigger is
better. The liberalization of the industry is really a struggle between Swedish and Danish state
energy companies. They will divide up the country and stop broad ownership in decentralized
energy production.”
Preben’s comments about industry consolidation are confirmed during my meetings with Hanne
Jersild, a Consultant with the Danish Wind Industry Association (the three core members are
Vestas, Siemens, and LM Glasfiber). Hanne and I meet in her office in downtown Copenhagen,
in a beautiful old building that is currently wrapped with restoration scaffolding.
The afternoon we meet, Hanne is busy organizing an upcoming offshore wind farm conference.
Like most Danes her English is excellent, and she is casually dressed in light brown slacks and a
turtle neck sweater. After initial introductions, I begin the conversation with the same question I
asked Jane Kruse at the Folkecentre, “What were the key policy, economic, and cultural
ingredients that encouraged the successful development of the Danish wind industry?”
Like Jane Kruse, she begins with the importance of grassroots support, the no-nuke movement,
Denmark’s history of co-ops, and local ownership of wind turbines. “Grassroots groups began
with very small home scale turbines, and the agricultural machinery manufacturers (like Vestas)
became interested. Co-operatives were the evident solution to develop wind turbines. Now, the
government policy is so free-market oriented, and the projects are so large, that co-ops are
selling their site licenses to big developers.”
The very reason that the Danish wind industry became an international success – the growing
domestic market and strong public support underpinned by locally owned wind co-ops – has
been abandoned by the Liberal-Conservative coalition government.
Hanne tells me that the Danish wind turbine manufacturers are hoping for renewal with a fourprong strategy:
1. Re-power existing land-based wind farms by replacing old, smaller turbines with
modern, large turbines. (Many of these wind farms will likely change ownership from
locally owned co-ops to large corporations, and this will erode public support for wind
turbines.)
2. Build large-scale offshore wind farms.
3. Continue to grow the export business for Danish wind turbines.
4. Consolidate Denmark as a hub for research and development of wind turbine
technology.
The result of the conservative government’s “free” market policy is consolidation, from a locally
owned, decentralized industry to a more concentrated, centralized industry. Like other more
mature industries in the global “free market” economy, the wind turbine industry is becoming an
oligopoly.
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The Elephant and the Mouse
As the Danish historian, Stig Hornshoj-Moller states, “the history of Denmark is above all a
struggle lasting more than a thousand years against being swallowed up by Germanic culture”.
Like Canada and the United States, Denmark is a mouse to Germany’s elephant.
When it comes to renewable energy, Denmark was the world leader until the start of this new
millennium, and they have inadvertently passed the torch to their large neighbour to the south.
Germany has swallowed up Denmark’s renewable energy policy and improved on it.
In 2001, Germany’s new red-green coalition government (Social Democrats and Greens)
legislated the phase out of the nation’s nineteen nuclear reactors. It also introduced legislation
similar to Denmark’s, including eco-taxes on fuel, energy conservation and efficiency measures,
and renewable energy incentives. The 2004 legislative amendment sets targets of at least 12.5%
renewable energy by 2010 and at least 20% renewable energy by 2020. There are now over
130,000 people employed in Germany’s renewable energy industry. In Preben Maegaard’s
words, “Germany’s renewable energy policy is a miracle!”
Meanwhile, here we are in Ontario, sitting through another summer of smog days with our
fingers crossed that the power won’t go out. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (another white
elephant) is lobbying in the corridors of power for $12 billion to build eight new nuclear reactors
in Ontario, and the McGuinty government has delayed the closure of our worst polluting coal
fired electrical plant. One has to wonder why we can’t learn from the Danes and Germans.
Last October in Toronto, the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association (OSEA) provided federal,
provincial, and municipal politicians with a spoon-fed, direct from the horse’s mouth seminar on
the successful Danish and German energy policies. According to Deborah Doncaster, OSEA’s
Executive Director, “the Ontario Ministry of Energy, the Ontario Energy Board, and the new
Ontario Power Authority are listening. We expect them to announce a Renewable Energy Tariff
policy that will encourage community-owned renewable energy projects this summer.”
As I hear the hope and concern in Deborah’s voice, I wonder if Canadians will have the wisdom
to abandon nuclear energy, and focus our collective energies and creativity on conservation,
efficiency and decentralized renewable energy strategies.
The Dane’s leadership in renewable energy was possible because their culture has been effused
with the “Danish Ideal”. In 1820, the great Danish luminary, N.F.S. Grundtvig, expressed this
ideal in a homily to his fellow citizens: “We are rich indeed, when few have too much and still
fewer have too little.” It was Grundtvig’s ideas of social equality and sharing that formed the
foundation of modern Danish society. The basic principle is that individuals are free to shape
their own lives, but they are also responsible to the community.
Canada has a proud heritage of working together to supply people and communities with their
needs. Our public health and education systems, public infrastructure and utilities, and the
sixteen million Canadians who are members of co-operatives and credit unions all speak to the
Canadian way.
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Canadians are facing a fork in the road. We can bravely join Denmark and Germany as world
leaders in renewable energy, or we can timidly follow our neighbour to the south, repeating our
past mistakes by building new nuclear reactors and squandering the world’s rapidly diminishing
fossil fuel reserves.
It’s time to strongly express our voices in favour of an energy policy for our common future. An
energy policy that leaves nuclear behind, and embraces conservation, efficiency and locally
owned renewable technologies. An energy policy that will leave a legacy of clean air, strong
local economies, and a debt-free public utility in Ontario.
Russ Christianson is the President of Rhythm Communications and has been involved in the
development of over forty co-operatives in Ontario over the past two decades.
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